


something worth coming back to

by onakissgodknows



Series: (almost) every inception pairing [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:46:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23147191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onakissgodknows/pseuds/onakissgodknows
Summary: After the Fischer job, Saito hasn't been sleeping.
Relationships: Eames/Saito (Inception)
Series: (almost) every inception pairing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1646140
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	something worth coming back to

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [值得回归](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23680720) by [amazingwoods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amazingwoods/pseuds/amazingwoods)



Saito has homes around the world – Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, London – but after the Fischer job, Saito can’t bring himself to go home. Can’t bring himself to step foot on another plane, so he stays in his Los Angeles high-rise, which he bought just to have a comfortable place to stay on the rare occasion his work took him to Los Angeles. It’s smaller than his other homes, and colder due to disuse, but he’s staying here – for the time being, anyway.

If he gets on another international flight, he might fall asleep and stay asleep the whole ten hours, and maybe he’ll get lost down there again and he’ll never wake up.

He conducts his business from the office in the L.A. high-rise, at a desk in front of a big glass window overlooking the valley. He could get used to this, maybe.

It’s just so damn hot.

Saito turns the air conditioning up and trades his three piece suits for loose button-downs and thinks if he stays in L.A., maybe this could be acceptable. Not ideal, but it’ll do for now.

He calls Cobb once, and Cobb practically hangs up on him. Ungrateful, considering Saito is the only reason Cobb’s made it home.

“I’m done with this life,” Cobb hisses into the phone, and Saito pictures him huddled in the corner of his house, out of earshot of his children. “I’m very sorry you’re having trouble, but we both held up our ends of the deal! There was supposed to be no further contact between us after the job was done!” Cobb’s voice softens a little now. “Anyway, Mr. Saito, if it’s a reality check you want, I’ve never been the best person to ask. My own grip on the real world is still a little, shall we say, tenuous.”

Saito laughs softly. “Who would you recommend I speak to, then?”

Cobb sighs. “Saito, I’m sorry. I don’t have any advice for you. Best of luck, though. I truly am sorry. You should never have had to experience this.”

“Not at all,” Saito says, more confident than he feels. “The job was completed. We saw our bargains through, and you brought me back. I’m grateful.” He clears his throat. “Give my best to your children.”

“I will.”

Saito hangs up and paces his office. The sun is sinking beneath the horizon, and soon the sky will be dark. Saito hates sleeping, and all the better for him that Los Angeles has a thriving night life and Saito has money to spare.

He gets his jacket and leaves the apartment. The human body is truly a wonder – prior to his experience on the Fischer job, Saito remembers he used to lament that he was getting older, used to notice his joints creaking a little too much and how he woke up every morning still tired from the night before, a change from when he was very young. Now – well, Saito has lived a lifetime. He isn’t sure how long he was there, in _limbo_ , as Cobb calls it, but his body feels positively sprightly compared to what he’d grown used to.

Saito goes out into the bustling city and finds a club, a place he’d been before with a few of his associates, and meets an acquaintance. The acquaintance has already had more than his share of alcoholic beverages and greets Saito warmly, introducing him to his companions. From there, the night disappears into a blur of drinks and bright lights, laughter and dancing and sitting in the backs of limousines and VIP rooms at clubs, until Saito’s mind goes so hazy he can’t remember a thing.

It’s this kind of night – only this kind of night – that will let Saito have a deep, dreamless sleep.

He wakes up on the stiff, uncomfortable couch in the living room of his high-rise, and he can tell someone else is in the apartment. There’s a pair of shoes that aren’t his next to the door, and there are two jackets on the coat rack, one of which he doesn’t recognize, but it’s some sort of expensive brown leather. Saito should be unsettled, but he feels too ill to register any other feeling.

Saito’s own shoes are off and his mouth feels full of cotton. When he stands, the world spins and it’s all he can do to get to the bathroom before he vomits.

He lays there on the cold tile floor, breathing heavily, his head buzzing vaguely. He can’t remember getting home.

Footsteps sound outside the bathroom, and someone steps in and sets a glass of water on the counter. “You should drink that,” he says. “And rinse out your mouth, too.”

Saito squints at the figure standing above him. Slowly, his face comes into focus. “Mr. Eames?”

“Good to see you, mate.” Eames doesn’t smile. “I’d offer you coffee, but that bloody coffee maker in your kitchen doesn’t work. It’s your place, anyway, so maybe when you stop feeling like puking you can come make me some.”

The coffee maker does work, it just needs to be jiggled a certain way. It needs to be replaced, but Saito never planned on spending much time here.

Eames leaves the bathroom, and Saito wonders if he was ever really there or if his mind is playing tricks on him. Worse, if Eames _is_ here – Saito’s stomach turns again – then why? Why would Eames be in his apartment? Where the hell is Saito’s totem? He remembers Cobb obsessively dropping the little top whenever he wasn’t sure of his surroundings, watching it spin and spin until it either toppled or didn’t, and Saito reflects with some amusement that he’s becoming that sort of person himself.

Saito remembers a million years ago after he was shot during the Fischer job when Eames pulled a gun out to shoot him – _he’s in agony, I’m waking him up_ – how Cobb said if Eames shot him he wouldn’t wake up.

Saito wonders if Eames has a gun with him now.

He pulls himself to his feet and drinks the water Eames brought him. The water’s real (at least it seems real), so Eames must be too. Saito staggers out into his kitchen where Eames, in the flesh, is sitting at the dining table.

Saito says nothing, just turns to the counter and fiddles with the faulty coffee maker until it finally comes to life. “How did you get in, Mr. Eames?” Saito asks.

“You let me in, you drunk bastard.”

Of course he had. More importantly – “How did you find me?”

“Pure chance. Aren’t I the lucky one.” A pause, then: “Your friends and I clearly frequent the same clubs.”

“Not my friends.” Saito would be hard pressed to even remember the names of the men he’d been with last night.

“Christ, man.”

Saito fills two mugs. He can hardly remember the last time he made coffee himself rather than having an assistant do it, or having it brought in. He sets one mug in front of Eames and doesn’t ask if he wants cream or sugar.

“You look like hell,” Eames says.

“Too much to drink,” Saito mumbles.

Eames shakes his head. “No, it’s more than that. You look like you haven’t fucking slept in a year.” He sips his coffee. “Or six months.”

Six months since the Fischer job.

“What’s the matter with you? You got what you wanted, Fischer dissolved his father’s empire, and you’re on top of the world. Yeah? Congratulations.” Eames lifts his mug like he’s toasting him.

The buzzing in his head hasn’t stopped. In fact, it’s getting worse. “I don’t remember getting home,” he realizes with a jolt, and gets unsteadily to his feet. That was one of the things Cobb always said about dreams, that you’d never remember the beginning, you’d just end up somewhere and – Saito doesn’t remember getting home.

Eames is on his feet too. “Saito, listen, I’m not bloody surprised you don’t remember getting home, you were fucking smashed.”

“No, I don’t – “

Eames realizes why Saito’s panicked. He grips his shoulder, tight. “Hey! Hey, it’s okay. It’s all right. You don’t remember coming home but where were you before you came into the kitchen?”

“The bathroom,” Saito says without hesitation.

“Right. And before that?”

“Woke up in there.” Saito gestures toward the living room.

“Yes.” Eames squeezes his shoulder. He’s so calm under pressure, Saito remembers liking that about him even back when they were working on the Fischer job. He has an attitude, and a dry sense of humor that’s not always to Saito’s taste, but when push comes to shove, Eames is the one Saito wants to have on his side. Cobb is too wrapped up in himself, Ariadne too pushy, Arthur too conservative, but since the day they met in Mombasa, Saito has simply felt comfortable around Eames.

That doesn’t mean he’s really here, though, doesn’t mean Saito isn’t dreaming. If anything, that makes it seem more likely this is a dream, because why would Eames be here?

He’s still holding Saito by the shoulder. “You have your totem, right? Let’s find that, okay?”

Saito’s totem is a heavy brass key. Ariadne insisted he have one, the same as the rest of the team, so Saito had the key made. It doesn’t unlock anything anymore, but it’s a copy of the key to his childhood home in Japan. His parents and grandparents are long dead and Saito’s the only one who will remember the key.

He fishes it out of the pocket of the coat he hung on the rack and closes his fist tight around it, comforted by the familiar weight and brassy smell. He clutches it to his chest and closes his eyes, feeling the anxiety subside.

Eames rubs his back lightly. “See? Real as anything.” He turns and goes into the living room, where he sits down on the couch where Saito had slept. “You’re not an easy man to find, Saito,” Eames says bluntly.

Saito sinks into the armchair opposite the couch. “You were looking for me?” he asks, bewildered. “Why?”

“Yeah. Well, I spent a good couple of months travelling, thanks to that lovely compensation we got from your company, much appreciated, by the way. Heard the news Fischer dissolved the company, so I figured you’d be awfully busy for awhile so I left you alone. I suppose a month or so ago I started actually trying to pop in for a visit, but you weren’t anywhere I expected you to be. Tried Tokyo, Paris, even Mombasa again, thought maybe you were a regular there. No luck, so I came to L.A. on a whim and who do I bump into but you, drunker than anything, in some expensive bloody nightclub in Hollywood.” Eames raises his eyebrows. “Have you been in Los Angeles this whole time?”

Saito doesn’t meet his eyes. “Yes.”

“Why?”

The question isn’t unexpected, but Saito hesitates to answer anyway. “If I get on a plane,” he begins, slowly, “another long flight….if I fall asleep….”

“You think you might not wake up,” Eames finishes for him. “So you’d rather stay in this hellhole then risk it.”

Saito nods.

“Do you sleep at all?” Eames asks incredulously.

Saito does sleep, but only when he’s so tired he can barely keep his eyes open, and even then he sets an alarm for every couple of hours, and in between snoozes he grabs his totem and holds it tight, reminding himself what’s real and what isn’t.

Because sometimes when he sleeps he’s back there, back in that palace he built himself in limbo.

_Decades_. Decades he spent there, he lived a whole life there alone. “I don’t sleep much,” he says to Eames by way of response.

“No wonder you look like shit.”

Saito cracks a smile at that. “We can’t all look like you, Mr. Eames.”

Eames laughs. “Thanks, mate. Perhaps if you slept a little more you’d get a touch closer.”

Saito shakes his head. His thoughts are racing. “You cannot understand what it was like to wake up from that. To have been an old man, prepared to die. I lost sight of reality. The only thing that existed was the world I created there. I had an empire there, Eames.”

“You have an empire here. Thanks to us, by the way.” Idly Eames plucks at a loose thread on his shirt and flicks it aside. He lets out a gusty sigh. “Cobb. Damn that man. You hire somebody for a job, you don’t expect him to get you trapped in limbo til your brain turns to mush, do you?”

“I do not blame Cobb,” Saito says, and it’s true. He hired Cobb for a specific task, and Cobb saw it through to the end. It had been Saito’s decision to go along for the ride.

“Well, I do,” Eames says moodily, and despite Eames having made it out unscathed, it’s clear he still harbors some resentment for Cobb putting them in the type of danger they’d been in. Real life-and-death danger, something none of them had signed up for at the start.

“You don’t get to the top in any business without being prepared for a few sacrifices,” Saito says stubbornly. “These are mine.”

“ _Sacrifices_?” Eames is incredulous. “A load of good your company and all your money do you if your brain’s too scrambled to enjoy them!”

“Do I seem scrambled to you?” asks Saito.

“No, no,” Eames says, holding out a reassuring hand. “That’s not what I mean at all. You’re very capable, Saito, goddamn scary sometimes, no amount of time in limbo is going to change _that_.”

_Goddamn scary_. Saito likes the sound of that and smiles despite himself. So goddamn scary, indeed, that he’s afraid to go to sleep at night.

Eames stands and pats Saito on the shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you in the shower, then we can go for a walk, you’ll feel better.”

“I can move,” Saito grumbles, jerking away when Eames reaches to help him stand up. Yet even as he locks the bathroom door behind him, he finds he’s pleased, for once, to not be alone. 

After showering and getting dressed in clean clothes, Saito feels a little more like something resembling a person. When he comes back to the living room, Eames is still there, reading the paper in the armchair.

Saito had half-expected him to be gone without a trace.

Eames looks at him over the top of his paper and grimaces. “Well, you look _better_ , but still like hell.” He folds the paper and tosses it on the coffee table, standing. “Shall we?”

It’s early afternoon by now. The bright California sun makes Saito squint when they step outside, and he notices Eames is doing the same. “Do you come to Los Angeles often?” Saito asks. They’re walking now, neither sure where they’re going, just that if Saito moves his body he’ll feel better.

“Not if I can help it,” Eames says. “The food’s great, of course, but the bloody _people_. Actors and models and half of ‘em without a lick of talent or brains.” His derision is apparent.

“So why are you here now?” Saito asks.

Eames flashes him a quick smile. “Passing through.”

They make a stop for lunch at a French café after passing by a couple of those trendy vegan restaurants Eames turns up his nose at, and a classic American joint Saito can’t stand. Over sandwiches and salad, Saito mentally retraces their steps to make sure he remembers exactly how he came to be here.

Satisfied that he does, Saito then turns his thoughts to Eames. He looks the same as Saito’s memory of him, though his face is red and forehead shiny with sweat from the heat of the day. He’s dressed more casually than Saito is used to seeing him, too.

It stands to reason that Eames is real, too.

Eames catches Saito watching him. “What?”

“Seeing you is like seeing someone I only knew in a dream, for a time,” Saito confesses. Despite the time they’d spent preparing for the Fischer job, Saito feels he was only truly close to Eames once the job began. Eames had spent a fair amount of time in Sydney, observing Browning, leaving Saito back in France with the rest of the team. After it was over and the plane landed, everyone had gone their separate ways without so much as a goodbye. It was very easy to look at the Fischer job as a half-remembered dream, especially when he’d spent so long in limbo that world is the one that felt real.

Eames grabs a hunk of bread from the bread basket between them and crams it into his mouth. “Well, I can’t say I don’t feel similarly,” he says, chewing. Saito wrinkles his nose slightly at Eames’s table manners. “Funny waking up after all that and just walking away, yeah? For you, even more so, I’ll bet.”

“Yes,” Saito says, and then, because he can’t resist: “I was only a tourist, after all.”

“Bloody well more than a tourist by the end of it. Never would have got the job done without you, in the end. Hell, you’re the only reason I didn’t get killed and dropped into limbo myself. You know Cobb wouldn’t have come down there after _me_.”

Saito remembers, vaguely, the gun Eames pressed into his hand, asking him to guard Fischer while he prepared the charges. He remembers keeping the projections away from both Fischer’s lifeless body beside him and away from Eames, very much alive and breathing and busy trying to make sure they all made it back. He remembers feeling himself slowly slipping away, and clinging to life long enough to make sure Eames made it. “If I’d died a little sooner you would have too. Both of us in limbo, then.”

“Isn’t that a pleasant thought.”

“Would have been more pleasant company than just myself.” Saito smiles slightly. “You have not answered my question this morning, Mr. Eames.”

“What question?”

Saito leans closer. “Why have you been looking for me?”

“You don’t need to intimidate me, Saito, you’ve answered your own question anyway.” Eames slouches back in his chair. “You don’t hold off the projections in the end, I get killed and drop into limbo. It’s not lost on me that without you, Cobb’s little ruse would’ve ended with me worse than dead.”

Saito doesn’t feel worse than dead. But Saito is lucky, he supposes, by virtue of having something Cobb needed. “Are you here to thank me, then?”

“I’m here,” Eames says, surprisingly gentle, “to see that you’re all right. And by the looks of things, you’re not.”

Saito feels himself mentally recoil, instinctively. “I am fine,” he says coolly. He obviously isn’t, he’s known it for months, but if it’s clear to everyone around him then he’s doing something wrong.

Eames looks at him a moment, then says, “Right, of course.” The waitress comes by and drops off the check. Eames raises his eyebrows at Saito. “You’re buying, mate.”

After Saito pays the check, they slowly wander back the way they came. “You know, considering that was your first experience with dream-sharing, I don’t blame you for feeling out of sorts,” says Eames

Saito snorts. “First and only. I don’t think I’d like to repeat that experience.” He doesn’t expect any need to, anyway. The Fischer job had a very specific purpose, and that purpose has been fulfilled.

“One and done, eh? You got what you wanted.” The wind is picking up now. “In that case, I’d advise you to try sleeping through the night again.”

“I don’t need a sleep counselor, Eames,” Saito says crossly. He especially doesn’t need sympathy or worse, pity, which he’s seen flashes of in Eames’s eyes. Here, walking down this city sidewalk, sweating through his linen shirt, he feels uncomfortably exposed. Eames has already seen far too much.

“I’m not trying to put you in therapy, I’m telling you to take a bloody sleeping pill like the rest of the insomniacs and get a good night’s rest.”

Saito doesn’t particularly want to drug himself to sleep, either. It’s not quite the same as sticking a needle in one’s arm, but any type of substance-aided sleep feels too dangerous. “I don’t think so,” Saito says.

Eames sighs and drops the subject.

When they arrive back at Saito’s apartment, Eames walks right in and gets settled like he lives here now, kicking off his shoes and getting a glass of water from the filter on the refrigerator. Saito is more meticulous, wrapping his hand around the key in his pocket and checking the apartment to make sure the details are right. After they’d landed at LAX and Saito first came here, he’d removed any touches that reminded him of the palace he built himself in limbo.

Everything looks the way it should – aside from the Englishman parked on the living room couch, flipping through channels on the TV Saito rarely touches – so Saito can relax, a little.

Eames finds a football game on TV (soccer, the Americans call it) and sets the remote down. “God, American television is crap, thank Christ for a little taste of home.”

Saito walks into the living room, feeling less comfortable in his own apartment than Eames is. “Is England still home for you, Mr. Eames?”

Eames shrugs. “S’pose. I’ve got a flat in London, but I’m not there much.”

Eames has always struck Saito as a bit of a loner, a little unsettled and always on the move. He’d looked out of place in Mombasa and seems out of place in Los Angeles. Saito supposes he does too. “Are you planning on being here long?”

“No idea,” Eames says. “This is all quite unexpected.”

Saito agrees, looking at Eames stretched out on Saito’s living room couch, where he clearly doesn’t belong. Yet here he is anyway. Unexpected is right.

The afternoon passes. Saito goes to his desk to get some work done, even though it’s a Sunday. He takes a phone call and he spends a good hour of his time arguing with some of his partners back in Japan. He wins the argument, as he always does, so he feels satisfied.

Eames spends the afternoon on the couch watching soccer and making the occasional passing inquiry about Saito’s work. Saito thinks he’s just trying to be polite; he cannot imagine that Eames is even a little interested in the day-to-day goings-on of a power corporation.

It’s getting harder to run the company remotely. It’s a good problem to have, Saito knows, but the day he must return to Japan is imminent. On one hand, Saito is looking forward to ending his self-induced exile and going _home_ , but –

The plane. Another flight as long as the Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight that brought him here months ago, a flight that should have been eleven hours but cost Saito fifty years before they landed.

Saito shuts down his work computer. Normally he works late into the night, but there’s only so much he can get done – and besides, Eames is still here. Saito goes into the living room, where Eames is still on the couch, eating Indian food from a takeout container he must have ordered sometime when Saito was working. Eames glances over at Saito as Saito sits down in the armchair. “What’s bugging you?” Eames asks.

Saito doesn’t ask how Eames knows something is bothering him. “I have to return to Japan soon.”

“About time, innit?” says Eames. “You’ve been here a long time.”

Saito can’t help but laugh a little. Six months feels like nothing to him, no time at all. “Yes,” he says. “Too long.”

Eames pushes aside his takeout carton. “You worried about the flight?”

Saito doesn’t respond. Eames already knows the answer.

“We can fly commercial. Won’t buy out the airline like you did before, make sure there’s plenty of people around so nobody can slip you anything without us noticing. You’ll be fine.” He reaches over and gives Saito’s arm a friendly pat.

Saito flicks his eyes over to him. “We?”

“I came all this way, right? Seems silly not to go back with you. Besides, I like Japan. I’m always on the hunt for a new place to call home for a few months.”

That makes Saito feel _something_ deep inside his chest, so he carefully pushes that feeling away. “You’ll have to pay your own way, Mr. Eames.”

“That hurts, Saito, it does,” Eames says sincerely, and then laughs. “Appreciate the generosity.”

The prospect of flying again feels marginally better if Eames will be next to him. Before Saito can talk himself out of it, he calls his assistant in Tokyo and asks her to book two first-class tickets for the following Monday. “Hope you’ve got your passport,” he tells Eames drily, and Eames just laughs again.

The evening ticks by. Eames shares his Indian takeout with Saito. Saito dreads sleep.

Sleep is, however, inevitable for most people, and when Eames starts yawning, Saito shows him the guest bedroom next door to the master suite. Eames must still be jet-lagged; Saito can hear him snoring only minutes after he shuts the door.

Once Eames is out, Saito feels alone again, and he hates the feeling more now than he has in months. He’s so _used_ to being alone that he’d almost forgot that sometimes it’s nice to have company. He spent fifty years with no one but himself and his own projections for conversation. Eames, on the other hand, isn’t a figment of Saito’s imagination. He’s sure of it. He _thinks_ he’s sure of it.

Saito sits on the couch with a book and tries to fight off sleep, but it’s useless, and before he knows it, he’s asleep. 

In his dreams, he’s always back there, in the palace on the side of a hill overlooking the sea. When he walks up to the front doors, they open for him and the staff welcome him back. The palace is Saito’s dream home, and there’s always hot food waiting for him.

It feels like home, and what Saito hates most about this place is how much he wishes he could stay. What frightens him is the idea that one day he might simply make the decision not to wake up.

The longer he sleeps, the more time he spends here, the more real this world feels. His real life slips away, fading from his memory like water running through his fingers.

Here, everything is his. Here, he’s always safe and he’s the most powerful being in the world. Here, he is a god.

Saito spends what seems like hours, days maybe, walking the halls of his palace and the paths along the cliffside, and when he returns to the palace there’s an extravagant gala taking place.

The world shakes, gently, throwing the balance of the room off ever so slightly. Saito pays it no mind, even when it happens a second time.

The third time is enough to send Saito sprawling onto his back and he wakes up on the couch with Eames standing over him, a hand around his upper arm, dressed only in underwear and a sleeveless shirt. It’s pitch black outside, clearly the dead of night, and the only light comes from the lamp on the side table Saito forgot to turn off.

“No wonder you don’t like going to sleep,” Eames says, his voice light but his eyes concerned.

Saito clears his throat and moistens his lips with his tongue. “The worst part,” he says, “is that when I’m there I don’t want to come back.”

“Well then,” Eames says, his voice still even. “Better make sure you’ve got something worth coming back to.” He tugs gently on Saito’s arm and gets him to stand. “C’mon. You’ll feel better sleeping in a bed.”

“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” Saito says, even as he follows Eames down the hall.

“Not sure you have much choice,” Eames says cheerfully. “You’ve looked dead on your feet all day.”

“If I dream again,” Saito says, sitting on the edge of his mattress when they reach the bedroom, “if I don’t wake up – “

“Hey,” Eames says, voice sharp, and Saito looks up and meets his piercing eyes. “I’ll be right here. I’ll stay with you until you wake up, and if you seem like you’re sleeping too deep, well…” He shrugs. “I’ll wake you up.”

Saito holds his gaze for a moment. This is acceptable. He rolls over. “You might as well lie down, then, Mr. Eames.”

If Eames is surprised by the suggestion, he doesn’t show it, just comes around the other side of the bed and lies down next to Saito. Saito turns off the light, and the room is quiet, though he can hear Eames’s light breathing. He can see the outline of his face in the darkness.

Saito is silent for a long time, fighting off sleep. Even though he feels safer now, he’s spent so long trying to avoid it. Finally he says – “Eames.”

Eames jumps a little next to him, sits up. “Yeah,” he says too loudly, trying to pretend he hadn’t been asleep.

Saito smiles. “Thank you for coming to find me.”

“Oh, you’re welcome, mate,” Eames says. “You had my back in there. Only fair I have yours out here. Yeah?”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Anyway,” Eames continues, “as it turns out, you’re the only person who was on that bloody job I couldn’t stop thinking about once it ended.”

Saito has thought of Eames too.

“I figured that had to mean something.”

“I think it does. Though I’m not convinced this isn’t all still a dream.”

“Hey.” Eames seizes Saito’s hand and squeezes, gives it a little shake. “Real enough for you?”

Saito closes his eyes. He likes the way Eames is holding his hand – tight enough that Saito’s sure he can’t fall. “Yes.”

“Good. In that case, go to sleep, Mr. Saito, and I’ll see you when we wake up.”

**Author's Note:**

> I set myself a challenge to write a fic for (almost) every possible Inception ship. This pairing is my absolute favorite (if you're with me hmu!!!!!!) but I'm not 100% thrilled with this so.....I might do more.


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